Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Lithium Boom Spurs Production From California Brine

Wow, these guys are still alive! That's impressive. Links below.
From Bloomberg:

Lithium demand, seen doubling in
the next eight years on sales of batteries used in electric
vehicles, is spurring a U.S. company to build a factory to
extract the metal from brine in California.

Simbol Materials LLC’s proposed Imperial Valley plant near
the Mexican border would slash the time and cost needed to
extract lithium from salty water, Chief Executive Officer Luka Erceg said in an interview. The closely held, Pleasanton,
California-based company may boost output from an initial 8,000
tons a year to as much as 64,000 tons by the end of the decade,
Erceg said, equal to 21 percent of projected global demand.
Simbol is among prospective lithium producers that are
trying to break into a market dominated by four companies
including Princeton, New Jersey-based Rockwood Holdings Inc. (ROC) The
price of the lightest metal, used to make long-lasting batteries
for laptops, power tools and now electric vehicles, jumped 35
percent in 18 months, according to Jonathan Lee, an analyst at
Byron Capital Markets in Toronto.

“Electric cars are eventually going to become a bigger
part of auto sales, and given that they require hundreds of
times the amount of lithium needed for laptops, that’s going to
really increase demand,” Chris L. Shaw, a New York-based
analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., said yesterday in a
telephone interview.

Hybrid Demand
Global demand will double to 300,000 tons by 2020,
according analysts at Dahlman Rose & Co. Sales of 1 million
electric vehicles a year would more than double battery-grade
lithium use which is currently 40 million pounds (18,144 tons),
Rockwood Chief Executive Officer Seifi Ghasemi said Sept. 11 in
a presentation.

Each electric vehicle uses about 50 pounds of lithium and
hybrids each use about 20 pounds, compared with about 0.1 ounce
for a mobile phone and about 1 ounce for an iPad, Ghasemi said.
About 40,000 electric vehicles and hybrid plug-ins were sold
globally last year, according to the EV City Casebook, a report
published on the International Energy Association’s website.

By 2020 there will be 3.9 million hybrid vehicles, 1.4
million plug-in hybrids and 2.8 million fully electric plug-in
vehicles, Erceg said.

While lithium is mined from ore, brine evaporation is the
lowest-cost source. Simbol’s technology takes brine from
geothermal power plants and extracts minerals via a so-called
reverse osmosis filtration system in a process that takes 90
minutes to 2 hours. Conventional methods using evaporation can
take 18 months, Erceg says....MORE